11.  The applicants reside in Ireland and are women over 18 years of age.
12.  The facts, as submitted by the applicants, are summarised immediately below. The Government’s position was that these factual submissions were general, unsubstantiated and untested either by a domestic court, or through any other form of interaction with the Irish State, and they made further factual submissions as regards each applicant (summarised at paragraphs 115-18 and 122 below).
13.  On 28 February 2005 the first applicant travelled to England for an abortion as she believed that she was not entitled to an abortion in Ireland. She was nine and a half weeks pregnant.
14.  She had become pregnant unintentionally, believing her partner to be infertile. At the time she was unmarried, unemployed and living in poverty. She had four young children. The youngest was disabled and all four children were in foster care as a result of problems she had experienced as an alcoholic. She had a history of depression during her first four pregnancies, and was battling depression at the time of her fifth pregnancy. During the year preceding her fifth pregnancy, she had remained sober and had been in constant contact with social workers with a view to regaining custody of her children. She considered that a further child at that moment of her life (with its attendant risk of post-natal depression and to her sobriety) would jeopardise her health and the successful reunification of her family. She decided to travel to England to have an abortion.
15.  Delaying the abortion for three weeks, the first applicant borrowed the minimum amount of money for treatment in a private clinic and travel from a money-lender (650 euros (EUR)) at a high interest rate. She felt she had to travel to England alone and in secrecy, without alerting the social workers and without missing a contact visit with her children.
16.  She travelled back to Ireland by plane the day after the abortion for her contact visit with her youngest child. While she had initially submitted that she was afraid to seek medical advice on her return to Ireland, she subsequently clarified that on the train returning from Dublin she began to bleed profusely and an ambulance met the train. At a nearby hospital she underwent a dilation and curettage. She claims she experienced pain, nausea and bleeding for weeks thereafter but did not seek further medical advice.
17.  Following the introduction of the present application, the first applicant became pregnant again and gave birth to her fifth child. She is struggling with depression and has custody of three of her children whilst two (including the disabled child) remain in care. She maintained that an abortion was the correct decision for her in 2005.
18.  On 17 January 2005 the second applicant travelled to England for an abortion believing that she was not entitled to an abortion in Ireland. She was seven weeks pregnant.
19.  The second applicant became pregnant unintentionally. She had taken the “morning-after pill” and was advised by two different doctors that there was a substantial risk of an ectopic pregnancy (a condition which cannot be diagnosed until six to ten weeks of pregnancy). She was certain of her decision to travel to England for an abortion since she could not care for a child on her own at that time of her life. She waited several weeks until the counselling centre in Dublin opened after Christmas. She had difficulty meeting the costs of the travel and, not having a credit card, used a friend’s credit card to book the flights. She accepted that, by the time she travelled to England, it had been confirmed that the pregnancy was not ectopic.
20.  Once in England she did not list anyone as her next of kin or give an Irish address so as to be sure her family would not learn of the abortion. She travelled alone and stayed in London the night before the procedure to avoid missing her appointment as well as the night of the procedure, as she would have arrived back in Dublin too late for public transport and the medication rendered her unfit to drive home from Dublin airport. The clinic advised her to inform Irish doctors that she had had a miscarriage.
21.  On her return to Ireland she started passing blood clots and two weeks later, being unsure of the legality of having travelled for an abortion, sought follow-up care in a clinic in Dublin affiliated to the English clinic.
22.  On 3 March 2005 the third applicant had an abortion in England believing that she could not establish her right to an abortion in Ireland. She was in her first trimester of pregnancy at the time.
23.  Prior to that, she had undergone three years of chemotherapy for a rare form of cancer. She had asked her doctor before the treatment about the implications of her illness as regards her desire to have children and was advised that it was not possible to predict the effect of pregnancy on her cancer and that, if she did become pregnant, it would be dangerous for the foetus if she were to have chemotherapy during the first trimester.
24.  The cancer went into remission and the applicant unintentionally became pregnant. She was unaware of this fact when she underwent a series of tests for cancer, contraindicated during pregnancy. When she discovered she was pregnant, the applicant consulted her General Practitioner (GP) as well as several medical consultants. She alleged that, as a result of the chilling effect of the Irish legal framework, she received insufficient information as to the impact of the pregnancy on her health and life and of her prior tests for cancer on the foetus.
25.  She therefore researched the risks on the Internet. Given the uncertainty about the risks involved, the third applicant travelled to England for an abortion. She maintained that she wanted a medical abortion (drug-induced miscarriage) as her pregnancy was at an early stage but that she could not find a clinic which would provide this treatment as she was a non-resident and because of the need for follow-up. She therefore alleged she had to wait a further eight weeks until a surgical abortion was possible.
26.  On returning to Ireland after the abortion, the third applicant suffered complications as a result of an incomplete abortion, including prolonged bleeding and infection. She alleges that doctors provided inadequate medical care. She consulted her own GP several months after the abortion and her GP made no reference to the fact that she was visibly no longer pregnant.